The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 6: 1951-1960

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.

Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.

This week's installment takes us back to 1951-1960, when computers moved from vacuum tubes to transistors, the first photo was scanned digitally and hula hoops created a market for plastics.

We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

1953: The Transistorized Computer (Computers)

In the '40s, the computer became reality. But it was still made with vacuum tubes.

Early computers like Britain's Colossus and the University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC were dependent on thousands of glass cylinders that worked a lot like light bulbs. These vacuum tubes were not only big and bulky. They were slow and power-hungry. They put off a ridiculous amount of heat. And their lives were short. But then, in 1953, a researcher at Britain's University of Manchester, Dick Grimsdale, built a computer based on solid-state transistors.

The transistor was invented in the '40s by three researchers at Bell Labs: John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. Like the vacuum tube triode, the transistor was an electrical switch capable of storing information. One electrical state represented one value, and a second state represented another. But it was based on semiconducting materials such as germanium, and this meant it was smaller, faster, cooler, and able to live much longer.

The University of Manchester's experimental machine is widely regarded as the first transistorized computer, though the Control Data Corporation and Bell Labs would soon follow with commercial machines based on the technology. By 1957, IBM had moved away from the vacuum tubes, introducing a machine that includes a record 2,000 transistors.

Today, the transistor lives on. But it has gotten much smaller — you know, Moore's Law and all that. The sad part is that we miss the vacuum tube — almost as much as we miss the punch card.

Above: J.H. Felker, left, gives instructions to the Tradic computer by means of a plug-in unit while J.R. Harris, right, places numbers into the machine by flipping simple switches. The new computer was developed under the direction of Mr. Felker. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

1950s: Sci-Fi Cinema (Entertainment)

Shortly after the Atomic Age dawned, we entered a golden era of sci-fi cinema. From magnificent movies like Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still to plenty of less stellar fare, Hollywood turned our fears of radiation and scientific overreach into films that ranged from mind-expanding to total cheese. Robots, mutants, Martians and other space aliens became firmly implanted in our collective consciousness, where they remain to this day.

Also in the '50s: Rock 'n' roll became the music of youth, with stars like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry assuming the mantle from swinging crooners like Frank Sinatra. Technology helped fuel the transition, with the solid-body electric guitar — in the form of Fender's Telecaster and Stratocaster models and Gibson's Les Paul — becoming a staple of the six-string arsenal.

1957: Spy Satellites (War)

When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, back in 1957, they kick-started a space race with the U.S. and caught the American government by complete surprise.

The Cold War had begun in earnest and the fact that the Soviets now possessed the capability to take a look at the U.S. from space was distressing enough, but not the main reason for concern. What really got the Americans worrying was the prospect that the Soviets might use their newfound technological advantage to launch nuclear weapons.

The fateful beep from the Soviet spacecraft was heard down on Earth and drove home the notion that the U.S. needed to do something to make sure it could enter the race as a credible player and never suffer the embarrassment of a Sputnik-like shock again.

Within a few months the government had responded with an entirely new new DOD agency. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (it later added Defense to its name to become Darpa) was tasked with meeting the U.S. military’s need for innovative science, research and development.

One of Darpa’s first objectives was to play catch-up with the Soviet technological surprise and it did so by creating the Corona program, a figurative eye in the sky. Corona was jointly funded by Darpa and the CIA, and from it came the first photo-reconnaissance satellites.

These spying spaceships circled the globe and took snaps of what was going on in the USSR and the People's Republic of China – they allowed America to keep tabs on what was afoot behind the iron and bamboo curtains of communism.

The Corona satellite officially became the first successful U.S. spy satellite when it returned photo negatives to Earth in August 1960. Service continued with launches through 1972.

Darpa was so skilled at space-age one-upmanship that NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office were created from early Darpa initiatives. NASA assumed responsibility for carrying the space-race torch as Darpa branched out to include any manner of technological advancement in the defense realm. There’s now an estimated 13,000 satellites in orbit – but how many of them are spy satellites, we can’t say.

1959: The Hockey Mask (Sports)

On the evening of Nov. 1, 1959, early in the first period of a National Hockey League game against the New York Rangers, goaltender Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens was hit in the face by a puck. Like every other goalie of his age, Plante didn't wear a protective mask. He dropped to the ice in a pool of blood. Again.

Back in the day, head shots were a routine occurrence. Goalies were expected to leave the ice, get their stitches and come back a few minutes later. Granted, it was a time before banana-blade curves and space-age materials turned hockey pucks into unpredictable 100-mile-per-hour bullets – but these were still hockey pucks, six-ounce pieces of frozen rubber that could and did put a hurting on exposed flesh.

By his own estimation, the 30-year-old Plante had already received 200 stitches in the course of his career. His nose had been broken four times. Twice he'd suffered a broken cheekbone, and once a broken jaw. He'd had enough. After Madison Square Garden doctor Kazuo Yanagisawa – who could "stitch a wound, smoke a cigar, and play gin rummy all at the same time," recalled reporters of the time – repaired the latest injury, Plante returned to the ice wearing a fiberglass mask.

Plante had designed the mask himself, using it in practice but never in a game. His coach forbade it; conventional wisdom held that a mask would cause a goalie to lose sight of the puck. Even Plante's teammates laughed at him. But on this night, Plante insisted. He refused to come back unless allowed to wear the mask.

Plante prevailed in that contest of wills, beat the Rangers 3-1, and wore the mask for the rest of his Hall of Fame career. Other goalies soon followed his example. Within a few years, masks were customary. Plante's simple model gave way to the fabulously painted creations of the 1970s, followed by the cage-helmet hybrids of the 1980s and finally today's masks, designed to absorb impacts that could easily be lethal.

Great athletes are often said to change the face of their game. For Jacques Plante, that description is literally true.

1959: The Hovercraft (Vehicles)

On the 50th anniversary of Louis Blériot's flight across the English channel, Captain Peter Lamb and inventor Christopher Cockerall took to the seas once again in the world's first fully functional hovercraft.

The idea for what we now know as a hovercraft had been around since the 1700s, with prototypes and experiments taking place in the early part of the 20th century. But it took Cockerall and his team at the National Research Development Corporation nearly a decade to build the first hovercraft, the SR.N1, in the late 1950s. The trip across the channel lasted a little over two hours, and in later iterations, the top speed was increased from 35 to 50 knots thanks to the fitment of a Bristol-Siddeley Viper III jet engine.

1957: The First Digital Photograph (Photography)

In 1957 Walden Kirsch became the first human to have his image digitized by a computer – at just three months old. His father was Russel A. Kirsch, the team leader for the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) and had chosen an image of his son as the first test of his team’s new drum scanner.

The SEAC was the first internally programmable computer and had been in operation since 1950. The new scanner could be fed images and then read variations in intensity from the surface of a photograph.

Kirsch’s scanner made a number of historic technologies possible, including CAT scans, satellite imaging and bar codes – not to mention being a precursor to digital photography which is still actively changing humans’ relationship with images.

1958: Tennis for Two (Entertainment)

Brookhaven National Laboratory, a research facility operated by the U.S. government, was home to the cutting edge of 1950s science and technology. The engineers and physicists who worked there would hold annual Visitors Days to show the public its work. William Higinbotham, the lab’s director of instrumentation, wanted to create a more interactive, entertaining display. So he used an analog computer to draw lines and a bouncing ball on the screen of an oscilloscope, calling the game “Tennis for Two” and allowing the players to use buttons and a knob to control the angle and timing of the ball’s return.

Tennis for Two was displayed for a few years at the lab and almost entirely forgotten about until the mid-1980s. Magnavox had patents for home videogame systems that it was enforcing successfully against companies like Nintendo, which attempted to invalidate the patent in court by arguing that Higinbotham (and by extension the United States government) had actually invented the videogame. Nintendo lost, but it did succeed in popularizing the story of Tennis for Two. Today, it is sometimes erroneously cited as being the first videogame, though it was predated by similar designs.

1953: DNA (Science)

Hiding behind the somewhat innocuous and jargon-dense title "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” is the one of the 20th century’s most groundbreaking discoveries: the DNA double helix.

Published on April 25, 1953 in the journal Nature, this incredibly important paper is often ranked as one of the most dramatic events in biology. For decades prior, scientists had argued about the mechanism underlying heredity – how parents pass on traits to their kids. Many biologists had thought that proteins were somehow in charge of this necessary part of evolution. It was a shock to the community when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the genetic code and showed that the relatively simple molecule DNA was in charge of inheritance from generation to generation.

As detailed in Watson’s book The Double Helix, the two scientists figured out the structure and function of DNA by looking at X-ray crystallographic results from other researchers. The results were not obvious; Crick later admitted that he had been on a small dose of LSD when he and Watson envisioned the double helix that controlled all life on Earth. The duo won the Nobel Prize in medicine a decade later for their discovery along with Maurice Wilkins. Unfortunately, rampant sexism in the scientific community denied that honor to Rosalind Franklin, a biologist who supplied Watson and Crick with key data for their finding and whose contributions are often overlooked.

Cracking the structure of DNA has been monumentally important for all of biology since. Scientists were able to figure out that the molecule is like an organic computer memory bank, storing information through time and translating its instructions into actions to allow evolution to proceed. It has allowed biologists to understand the genetic history of all organisms and researchers to synthesize and control DNA strands. Much as atomic energy determined the course of the 20th century, the coming decades are very likely to be shaped by mankind’s new genetic powers.

James Watson and Francis Crick, crackers of the DNA code. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis.

1960: The Black Box (Gadgets)

David Warren, whose father died in a plane crash when he was 8, created the Flight Data Recorder in 1954. But the device, better known as the Black Box, didn't become popular until 1960.

Warren, an aeronautical researcher and chemist for the Australian government's Aeronautical Research Laboratory (ARL), came up with the idea for the Black Box after his participation in a team investigating the cause of a series of fatal plane crashes involving the world's first commercial jetliners in 1953 and 1954. After the investigation, Warren published a report titled "A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents" that detailed his plans for a steel, fire-proof box that could record both the instrument activity on a plane as well as up to four hours of conversation in the cockpit. The report and Warren's idea went on ignored by aviation authorities around the world. So, in 1957, Warren built a prototype of the Flight Data Recorder, which was painted red — most Black Boxes are painted red or orange today as well.

But while the Black Box is considered a must-have device in today's aircraft, Warren's prototypes — built with the help of his colleagues in the Australian government — were dismissed as unnecessary until 1958, when Warren showed the device to Sir Robert Hardingham, the Secretary of the British Air Registration Board, during a visit to the ARL. Hardingham asked Warren and his team to produce a Flight Data Recorder for British planes and shortly thereafter, Canadian aviation authorities began using the device too. This was the first significant adoption of the Black Box — which at that time failed to take off in Australia and the U.S.

A second turning point came in 1960, after an Australian commercial plane crash resulted in an investigatory judge suggesting that all planes be outfitted with Flight Data Recorders. Australia then became the first country to make the Black Box mandatory in its aircraft. Today, the Black Box is nearly as widely used in an aircraft as are wings and propellers.

Warren died in 2010, in Melbourne, and according to a New York Times obituary, he never made a profit from the Black Box.

Australian scientist David Warren poses with his flight data recorder. Photo: Australian Department of Defense/AP

1959: Fidel Castro (Security)

In 1959, Fidel Castro was swept into power as Cuba's president and dictator, pushing the CIA to plan his assassination and/or his fall from office – plans that obviously never bore fruit.

In 1962 Castro was backed by the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis – a three-way standoff between him, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Chief Nikita Khrushchev. After a tense 13 days, the Soviets dismantled their nuclear missile sites in Cuba and the United States agreed never to invade Cuba.

In hindsight, some of the methods U.S. authorities employed in failed bids or proposals to assassinate Fidel Castro verge on the bizarre to humorous and, as the Guardian said, "would put 007 to shame." The plots include an exploding cigar, putting explosives in shells while hoping Castro would discover them scuba diving, a pen-syringe and a underwater diving suit "that would be infected with a fungus that would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease," according to the Guardian.

Castro was succeeded by his brother, Raúl, in 2011.

Fidel Castro speaks to supporters at the Batista military base "Columbia," now known as Ciudad Libertad on Jan. 8, 1959, after dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country and Fidel Castro and his band of rebels descended from the island's eastern mountains. Photo: AP.

1951: Catalyzed Plastics (Design)

In 1951, Phillips Petroleum researchers Paul Hogan and Robert Banks began exploring the idea of using natural gas byproducts to create components from gasoline. They quickly found unexpected success, but not in the form of a fuel. Combining both ethylene and propylene with a chromium oxide catalyst, the scientists discovered a resulting white, hard plastic — polypropylene and high density polyethylene (HDPE). The materials were a major breakthrough, requiring only a couple hundred PSI to create a product much harder than other synthetics of the time.

Phillips quickly developed a new branch of business focusing on plastics, but the market wasn't quite ready for the new material. In fact, its future was uncertain until a surprising product came to the rescue: the hula hoop. The fitness craze started by the device in 1958 had such a massive impact on production that the hoops took over the entire output of HDPE for six months.

Meanwhile, unaware of their work, German researcher Karl Ziegler at the Max Planck Institute had found a more expensive but less demanding way to create the same materials using a titanium-based catalyst. For his work, Ziegler was awarded the Nobel Prize and was long considered the plastics' inventor, along with Italian scientist Giulio Natta.

However, in 1982, over thirty years after Hogan and Banks initial filed their patent, the courts finally settled on a decision, crediting the American duo as the first to create the substances that are now formed into everything from furniture to food containers to recreational apparel – combined output of the materials in 2008 was over 75.1 million tons and growing.

Two models gracefully swing their new Hula-Hoops as they display the latest bodice creations in lingerie at a fashion show in Frankfurt, West Germany, Oct. 21, 1958. Photo: Riethausen/AP.

1958: The ICEE Machine (Business)

The post-war United States was all about the positive. Jobs were plentiful, and money was flowing. The first planned community in Levittown, New York was completed in 1951, and the suburban trend it started caught on. With their new General Motors cars gassed and ready to go (GM was the largest company on the planet at the time), and new highways spidering out across the country, people began the move out of cities and into shiny new communities.

And they were hot, and they were thirsty when they got there.

Which was something of a problem for Omar Knedlik, a Dairy Queen owner in Coffeyville, Kansas, who didn’t have a soda fountain to serve the parched horde. What he did instead was put bottles of soda in a freezer, and sell the partially frozen drinks. The slushy, carbonated drinks were a hit, but a pain to create over and over. So in 1958, with the help of a Dallas engineering firm, the ICEE machine and company were born, devoted to the manufacture of automated, frozen, carbonated goodness.

You may know your favorite frosty treat as an ICEE, a Slurpee, or a Slush Puppy, perhaps as the ThirstFreezer – they all come from the machine Knedlik invented. Did the automobile open up the suburban lifestyle? Sure, but the ICEE made it cool.

Since 2007, Wired.com’s This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available for pre-order today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.